Posts Tagged ‘analysis

The latest TIME magazine has an article on homosexuality in the animal kingdom, titled, appropriately enough,
Why Some Animals (and People) Are Gay. I am all for articles like this, if only because they inherently refute the “Homosexuality is unnatural!” argument, and because gay penguins are completely adorable.

See?

Adorable.

But there were a couple sections in this that made me wonder, exactly, why John Cloud was chosen to write the article. Surely they could have found someone who could make science accessible without resorting to cheap and insulting gay jokes? Please?

I mean, there’s got to be a way to inform people that “One particularly charged finding is that in most species besides humans, same-gender pairings rarely lead to lifelong relationships” without following it with “In other words, when one attractive bonobo male eyes another in a lovely patch of Congo swamp forest, they occasionally kiss and then move on to other oral pleasures, but they don’t bother anyone afterward about trying to legalize their right to an open-banana-bar ceremony.” (emphasis mine)

Translation: “okay, sometimes animals are gay, but it’s a phase they go through, and thus it’s just a phase for humans and I’m also going to mock gay marriage, because it’s not found in nature.”

Later, in the same article: “Last year, researchers studying a Hawaiian colony of albatrosses found that nearly a third of all the couples involved two females who courted and then shared parenting responsibilities. (Albatrosses don’t have U-Hauls, so no lesbian jokes, please.)”

Dude, you’re the one adding in U-Haul Lesbian jokes. In a science article, which pretty much by definition doesn’t need cheap jokes. Especially cheap homophobic ones. Were you so uncomfortable writing about homosexuality in any form you had to “defuse” your article with these bits? Because I really can’t make sense of them otherwise.